BlackRock Adds Ethena's Synthetic Dollar to Its $20T Aladdin Risk Management Platform

BlackRock will list Ethena's USDe as an approved digital asset on Aladdin, its institutional portfolio and risk-management platform, the two firms said Monday, opening the synthetic dollar to the asset managers, banks, insurers and pension funds that run money on the system.

Ethena, whose USDe synthetic dollar has a circulating supply of about $4.45 billion, said the integration gives institutional users a familiar interface to hold and monitor the token. As part of the same agreement, BlackRock's tokenized Treasury fund, BUIDL, will serve as the primary backing asset for Ethena's whitelabel stablecoin product, and Ethena will provide a liquidity facility for BlackRock's tokenized products. Ethena said Aladdin is used by financial institutions to manage more than $20 trillion in assets.

ENA climbed about 5% after the announcement, while Bitcoin was little changed, according to CoinGecko data. The token trades around $0.08, with a market capitalization near $740 million, down sharply from levels reached during last year's rally. USDe held its peg, trading at about $0.998.

The deal marks the deepest link yet between the world's largest asset manager and a DeFi protocol built on derivatives trading, and it extends a pattern of traditional finance firms moving capital and infrastructure onchain rather than building competing rails. For Ethena, it adds an institutional distribution channel on top of a flurry of recent tie-ups with regulated players.

What the agreement covers

The arrangement has three parts, according to Ethena's announcement. USDe gets added to Aladdin as an approved digital asset. BUIDL, BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, becomes the main reserve asset for the stablecoins Ethena builds for other applications and networks through its whitelabel service. And Ethena commits a liquidity facility, sized at $100 million and run through tokenization platform Securitize, to support BlackRock's tokenized products.

Under the liquidity facility, eligible BUIDL holders can swap the fund's tokens for supported stablecoins including USDC and USDtb, and convert back into BUIDL outside regular trading hours, according to reports of the announcement. Securitize is BUIDL's regulated transfer agent.

BUIDL holds about $3.06 billion in tokenized U.S. Treasury bills, cash and repurchase agreements, according to DefiLlama, placing it among the largest tokenized Treasury funds onchain. Ethena's whitelabel service, which it markets as stablecoin-as-a-service, already underpins third-party tokens such as Jupiter's JupUSD on Solana, which Ethena launched earlier this year backed primarily by BUIDL.

Delta-neutral Strategy

USDe is not a conventional stablecoin. Rather than holding cash and short-term Treasuries one-for-one, it uses a delta-neutral strategy: pairing spot crypto holdings with offsetting short futures positions and capturing the funding-rate spread to hold a roughly $1 peg and generate yield. Listing that instrument on Aladdin, the system institutions use to track and manage risk across portfolios, gives the synthetic dollar a route into allocations it has not previously reached.

The tie-up also illustrates how BlackRock is using BUIDL as a building block for other firms' products. By making the fund the default reserve for Ethena's whitelabel stablecoins, BlackRock embeds its tokenized Treasuries into stablecoins issued across multiple applications and chains, while Ethena's facility gives BUIDL holders a faster onchain exit.

Institutional Deals

The BlackRock agreement caps a stretch of institutional partnerships for Ethena. This month, $480 billion asset manager Janus Henderson made a strategic investment in Ethena's ENA governance token and said it would allocate treasury cash to USDe and explore exchange-traded products tied to the assets. Days earlier, Coinbase Ventures disclosed its first investment in Ethena alongside a distribution agreement covering Coinbase's user base.

Ethena has also expanded an arrangement with crypto bank Anchorage Digital, named Kraken as institutional custodian for USDe's reserves, and worked with Safe to enable gas-free USDe transfers.

The two firms are not new partners. Ethena's USDtb stablecoin, which launched in December 2024, holds the majority of its reserves in BUIDL and is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank. The Defiant covered the USDtb launch at the time. In June 2025, Ethena and Securitize enabled round-the-clock swaps between BUIDL and USDtb.

BlackRock, for its part, has steadily widened its onchain footprint beyond its spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds. It launched BUIDL with Securitize in March 2024 and has since partnered with decentralized exchange Uniswap and taken a position in its UNI token, part of a broader move by large asset managers, including Apollo Global Management, to invest directly in DeFi protocols.